


Inhale, Exhale

by fluffernutter8



Category: Veronica Mars (TV)
Genre: Clash of the Tritons, Episode Tag, Gen, Lord of the Bling, Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-03
Updated: 2014-06-03
Packaged: 2018-02-03 06:07:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1733891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluffernutter8/pseuds/fluffernutter8
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>The lighter was always in her purse. But she left it on her dresser the night she disappeared.</i> Logan thinks about his mother and discovers false hope.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Inhale, Exhale

In life, Lynn Echolls smelled just faintly of waxy lipstick and artificial mint beneath a stronger layer of Lynnie of the Valley, the custom perfume Aaron had ordered for their tenth anniversary.  She dabbed it on her neck and wrists every morning. Logan remembers the way that, slouching in the doorway, he could tell her mood from the way she touched it on: haphazard when Trina had showed up unannounced the night before, nearly reverent right after Aaron’s latest indie had won some award.

But here in her pillow, he doesn’t smell it at all. He smells what his mother really smelled like: dandruff shampoo and cold cream, and a warm scent that Logan has always associated with her that is probably the special allergen-free detergent she always insisted on.

Aaron is still dealing with the police and the press. Thankfully he has not anchored Logan to his side, demanding that he grieve in public. Logan does not even care if this is about Aaron’s need to be seen, to have a close-up of his clenched jaw and deliberate touch of hand to forehead be on the cover of this week’s People. It means that Aaron is out of the house. It means that Logan is free to lie on his mother’s bed, and try not to think about how much longer her things will smell like hers.

He is half regretful and half thankful that, having had a personal disciplinary hearing with his father after the aborted family one with Clemmons, he had already had something to take the edge off when he heard the news. It meant that for a moment it was unbelievable. It meant that for a moment he laughed like a punch to the gut. It meant that he had an extra moment before everything inside of him collapsed.

It is hours later, and everything is still collapsing. Logan had thought that it would be better here, scent memory and all that. He had thought that being in the bed would remind him of his childhood, when Aaron would leave town in the early morning for what he said was a location shoot and was probably a mistress somewhere. Lynn would excuse Logan’s school absences with breezy descriptions of falls and boyish games before tucking him into her side of the bed with the remote control and a collection of ice packs. She would lie on Aaron’s side and they would watch movies, the screwball comedies that always brought out her real, husky laugh instead of the high one she had perfected for parties.  At lunch time she would go have the cook make him pancakes, but would always stay out of the room long enough that, until he was a teenager, Logan honestly thought she was making them herself, that she did this one thing just for him.

Being in the bed doesn’t help, but Logan has always been a detail-oriented masochist, so he walks to the dresser to call for pancakes. He fumbles for the intercom button past the stack of half read paperbacks his mother never could complete for her book club and the single script offer that his mother couldn’t bear to get rid of even though it had long since gone to someone else.

When his hand touches the lighter, tucked cool against the cradle of the phone, he thinks it is some odd piece of jewelry. It is only when he brings it into the light that he recognizes it and knows that his mother is still out there, that she left this for him. She might not be in Neptune or anywhere nearby but she is somewhere, smelling of something unfamiliar, of cotton, perhaps, or sugar, or seawater.


End file.
